Month: January 2009

It's over. Really, it's over.

Numerous times over the past eight years I have discussed the concept of "Outrage Fatigue," the Bush administration's purposeful effort to bury the nation under such an avalanche of cronyism, malfeasance, deception, disregard for the rule of law, and brazenly stacked bullshit that we would simply accept it as the natural state of affairs. Previous presidents found out the hard way that a scandal can cripple an administration. Bush's lasting contribution to the presidency was the discovery that, as animals herd together so that predators cannot target any single member, piling 1001 scandals on top of one another negates the damage any one could cause.

I tried to get up the nerve for a retrospecticus of two terms of this administration of nitwits and thugs. Suffice it to say that like the rest of the nation I am simply sick to death of George W. Bush and everyone associated with him. Once again I think back to the words of the famous epilogue to the Lincoln assassination once the conspirators were executed. The Evening Star noted, "In the bright sunlight of this summer day the wretched criminals have been hurried into eternity…We want to know their names no more." That is the entirety of what Americans want from this administration, this (now ex-) president: to go away. Go away and never be heard from or seen again. Get out of our sight while we attempt to put band-aids on the gaping wounds left by eight years of willful negligence and thundering incompetence. We never want to look at any of the Bush inner circle again unless they are seated next to a team of defense attorneys and attempting in vain to testify for their legal freedom.

In lieu of a retrospective I tried to think of the quintessential Bush moment, the single image or anecdote which can be used decades from now to summarize the experience of living in Bush's America. That is a tall order. Eight years is a long time. I dare you to think over those years and try to remember every disaster, scandal, and legal subterfuge wrought by this administration. No single example can encapsulate everything that happened, but I humbly submit the following as the quintessential Bush Presidency moment: the testimony of Alberto Gonzales, Monica Goodling, and Sara Taylor in the DoJ scandal. That scandal itself is unlikely to be historically relevant, but that testimony…holy shit.

What better sums up the past eight years than Sara Taylor, who went from VP of the College Republicans to White House Political Director in the span of 3 months, testifying about her oath of loyalty to the President? Who better represents the kind of people Bush appointed to run the most powerful nation on Earth than Monica Goodling, the vacuous, unqualified hack from Pat Robertson University whose deer-in-headlights testimony looks more like an SNL skit than historical reality? But if I have to pick one single moment it has to be Alberto Gonzales with that idiotic oops-I-shit-my-pants smirk on his face testifying about all of the things he didn't recall (hint: everything)

I don't really have to stick to a single example, do I? Because the time he denied that the Constitution grants the right of habeas corpus (nearly blowing Arlen Specter's jowls off in the process) is pretty awesome too:

This sole example doesn't provide substantive information about everything that went to hell over 2,922 days, but when I need to show my kids (or more realistically my students) the five minute version of 2000-2008 I will use these videos and say, "These are the kind of people who were in control of the largest and most powerful government in the history of the world." And that, as improbable as it may seem, says it all.

(chime in if you think there's a better Bush-in-nutshell moment)

Sometimes having a sibling does not work out well for people in the public eye. Jimmy Carter had Billy. Bill Clinton, Roger. Jessica Simpson, Ashlee. Jose Canseco, Ozzie. Alec Baldwin, Daniel (and Stephen). And pill-popping pundit extraordinare Rush Limbaugh has David. As the "talented" member of the Limbaugh family is intolerable under the best of circumstances it will horrify you to learn that Rush is a modern day Daniel Webster compared to his kid brother. David is the author of instant remainder pile books like Bankrupt: The Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of Today's Democratic Party and Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity. But he is best known on his own as a columnist for, who else, the Washington Times, i.e. the last rung on the conservative pundit ladder, just ahead of Little Green Footballs, the John Birch Society newsletter, and Swank magazine.

While Rush's afterbirth is too unoriginal and repetitive to make a full-scale FJMing tolerable or fun, his latest Times missive ("Bloodlust of the Avenging Left") is an example of right-wing logic not to be missed. To wit (emphasis mine):

This returns us to the Ackerman op-ed urging impeachment of (Jay) Bybee for "his legal distortions" concerning those "torture memos." In the liberal spirit of declaring their opinions the only reasonable opinions — as with global warming — Ackerman apparently believes that any lawyer who opines that tough interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, do not constitute torture is guilty of legal distortion and is "a systematic enabler of the war crimes that have disgraced America." Ackerman allows that Bybee "may have acted in good faith," but his opinion "fails minimum tests of legal competence." There you have it. If you disagree with this liberal professor about an issue on which reasonable people clearly disagree, you are incompetent, and unless you can demonstrate your good faith, you should be punished.

There are two major flaws with this "logic." First, this mischaracterizes the question as some sort of innocuous difference of opinion, as if Jay Bybee opposes tax cuts and his political opponents support them. Perhaps the author should familiarize himself with the Nuremburg Judges' Trial, after which a lot of people ended up on the gallows for concocting sham legal rationalizations for committing crimes against humanity. Is authorizing torture the same thing as the Holocaust? Of course not. But the fact remains that torture is indeed a war crime and ludicrous, selective, and deterministic interpretations of the law to excuse it carry the burden of culpability.

Second, the circular nature of Limbaugh's false dichotomy is obvious. Neocon extremists argue that torture is OK (or that what they do isn't torture) therefore they have committed no crime because this is an issue about which people disagree – for instance, neocon extremists argue that torture is OK. The existence of conflicting opinion does not make an issue contentious. As usual, right-wingers live in a fantasy world in which every opinion has validity, and as long as someone holds said opinion then it is an equal partner in public discourse. Reasonable people (like John Yoo and Doug Feith!) say that torture is permissible. Reasonable people (like, we asked EVERYONE in Cheney's office!) believed the pre-Iraq War intelligence. Reasonable people (like David Irving!) argue that the Holocaust never happened. See? This is the goal – establish a discourse in which facts are irrelevant and all that matters is saying what you think loudly enough.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the outgoing administration's behavior and the fact that Obama is clearly a gigantic pussy who isn't going to authorize his DoJ to investigate war crimes is this new iteration of the Nuremburg Defense. Instead of "I was just following orders" we now have "(I/he/etc) acted in good faith." What the fuck does that even mean? It's not just a poor justification; it's no justification at all. It's an empty platitude which vaguely suggests that the people who approved, ordered, and executed torture didn't really think it was torture so therefore they committed no crime. To suggest that acting in good faith is any sort of legal defense negates the entire purpose of a criminal justice system. Obama's statements send a clear message: pervert the law however you want. There are no consequences.

Combining two different opinions does not automatically create debate. Some people argue (in good faith, no doubt) that the world is 6,000 years old. Choosing to believe something idiotic and only defensible outside of the rules of logic doesn't oblige the rest of us to take your opinion seriously. Everyone's entitled to his or her opinion, a maxim that in no way implies that said opinions are presumed valid simply by virtue of being uttered.

No, this is not about the throttling that the Philadelphia Eagles endured at the hands of my beloved Cardinals and "Hail Larry" Fitzgerald. It's about a new friend of mine who is graciously enriching our lives and this website.

In the comment section of the recent thread about the murder of an unarmed, restrained 22 year old black male in custody of the BART police in San Francisco, we were all treated to the elegant pontifications of Ku Klux Kommenter calling itself "mimi." Read the comments at your leisure, as I see no purpose in recapping them here.

I long ago learned the futility of debating knuckle-dragging racists who can barely stammer out an uncapitalized, poorly spelled non-sentence of sub-moronic hate.

Through the miracle of teh internets I was able to locate this modern day Byron via its IP address. Proving that there is some sort of god who loves and watches over me, said commenter is from Philadelphia. Not the city of brotherly love adult onset diabetes fans who booed Santa Claus the World Series Champion Phillies. I'm talking about Philadelphia, Mississippi. Could this have worked out more perfectly?

Philly Junior has no World Series baseball team, delicious namesake sandwiches, Ben Franklin impersonators, or Liberty Bells. The only noteworthy aspects of its decrepit, pointless existence have been to host two important events that help explain the kind of America that produces "mimi" – the infamous murder of three Civil Rights workers in 1964 (as retold in the popular film Mississippi Burning) and Ronald Reagan's 1980 masterpiece of dog whistle win-'em-over-with-racism politics, the "I believe in States' Rights" speech.

Rather than discuss the history of those events in any depth, it is more instructive to look at what has happened to Philly Junior since Reagan's visit so many years ago.
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A tactful contemporary description of the town notes:

As has been common for small towns across the U.S. in the last part of the twentieth century and since, the economic base of the town and surrounding area has been adversely affected by the abandonment by long-present industries that have down-sized, consolidated or moved to more financially beneficial locations.

Read: like the Rust Belt, only worse because it's in Mississippi. But wait! In free market wet dream America there are ways for economically dying communities in the middle of nowhere to save themselves.
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I will now pause while you place bets on whether the next thing I say involves a casino or a prison.

However, this adverse effect has been offset or even reversed by the development of an entertainment and casino center at Pearl River Resort, located on the nearby reservation of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.

As we know full well what kind of "development" seedy casinos in impoverished areas bring, let us safely assume that Philly Jr has been and remains broadly representative of post-industrial towns everywhere. The jobs leave, the community descends into an uncontrolled death spiral, and people who have burned more books than they've read are desperate for salvation or, failing that, a scapegoat.

Now. I wonder who the folks of Philadelphia, Mississippi might choose to blame for their shitty lives. I wonder who they might consider responsible for the death of Republican Fantasy America from 1952, the great era that never was.

I wonder if they blame Austrian School economics or multinational political agreements which have fundamentally (and unfavorably) altered the economic landscape from the perspective of the American working class.

Shit. I was wrong. It's the negroes. I thought I had two good guesses, but the problem is negroes. To quote Frisky Dingo's Mr. Ford, "And you can thank Ronald Reagan's ass for that!"

The Conservative God himself is more responsible than any politician not named "George Wallace" for the mainstreaming of, if not overt racism, race-based scapegoating. That the timing of this series of comments allows me to make this post on MLK Day, a holiday Reagan repeatedly and vigorously opposed until Congress submitted it with a veto-proof majority, is just one more example of how everything's coming up Ed on this subject. As most of the South (and certainly rural Mississippi) evenly mix dirt-poor white and dirt-poor black, Reagan put into action the famous words of the 19th Century robber baron Jay Gould: "I can hire on half of the working class to kill the other half."

The "mimis" of the world are no more than the logical end result of political discourse that is so eager to provide poor, angry, ignorant people with someone to blame for their plight. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain; your depressing shit hole of a town is so because of black people. In the Great Communicator's words, working peoples' paychecks shrunk because of "welfare queens driving Cadillacs", "strapping young bucks" buying steaks with food stamps, and the Voting Rights Act, which was "humiliating to the South."

Racism is nothing but the product of willful, proud ignorance and opinion leaders, be they on talk radio or in the White House, who actively encourage those who wear illiteracy like a badge of honor to find scapegoats rather than think about the root causes of declining prosperity. Racism didn't begin in 1980, of course, but you almost have to marvel at the skill with which the GOP turned the latent fear-of-anyone-different racism of the stupid into a comprehensive answer for the questions raised by the rapid and total socioeconomic collapse of places like Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is a very popular PC game and its appeal is based largely on its realism. It gives a nation full of adults who thought as children that it would be really cool to fly an airplane the opportunity to sit before a fake instrument panel in an imaginary cockpit and say things like "Tower, are we cleared for takeoff?" Juvenile thrills abound. If we suddenly thrust an avid Flight Sim player into control of an airliner in mid-flight, he might have some useful information. He could probably identify certain instruments or grab the right lever to lower the flaps, but said flight is ultimately going to end in disaster. Despite its significant realism, no amount of playing the game makes one an airline pilot.

Last week's post about VBAC raises a very interesting question that the advent of the internet hath wrought. Like the gamer who thinks that his simulated experience makes him a real airline pilot, the overwhelming amount of information made available on the internet can easily lead people to overestimate their own capacity for decision-making. Having the world of information at our fingertips is both empowering and deceptive. For every individual who makes better decisions by educating herself there is another who does what Americans do best: consume a small amount of superficial, decontextualized information which he believes makes him an infallible expert.

In recent years medical professionals have noted a disturbing new trend which is illustrated in this recent Canadian study of 300 doctors:

(Some) doctors said many patients are quick to self-diagnose using the Internet, and are often resistant to the physician's diagnosis and course of treatment.

Apparently this phenomenon, the "WebMD effect" if you will, is quite familiar to doctors and nurses these days. I can only imagine how many suburban hypochondriacs walk into the office/ER and offer the name of a condition rather than a list of symptoms. Microsoft released an internal study showing that not only is such self-diagnosis common but it often leads to unduly dire conclusions (headache = basal skull fracture). While some people who played doctor offer cautionary tales of self-diagnosis turned disastrous, my impression is that WebMD continues to serve as the Build-a-Bear Workshop of American healthcare – a one stop U-Diagnose-It site for hypochondriacs, the uninsured, and the "What makes the damn doctors and their fancy book-learnin' think they're smarter than me?" crowd. And WebMD seems like Johns Hopkins compared to what the rest of the internet offers the unwell. My personal favorite: "How to Self-Diagnose Appendicidis" which includes helpful tips like "You feel a pain in your gut."

Americans generally do a terrible job of locating happy mediums. There is a wide, unpopulated gulf between empowerment through knowledge and a dangerously false sense of security and expertise. Tools and information intended to allow Americans to make better, more well-informed decisions quickly jumped the shark and turned into blog posts with gems like "I just went to WebMD for a self diagnosis of a fluttering I feel in my chest at times." Rather than thinking, "I should probably ask a medical professional about my irregular fucking heartbeat" the classic American combination of laziness and arrogance sends people running to the nearest we browser to quite literally cure what ails them.

More information is always better, but it must be kept in context. Having all of the pieces does not mean that one knows how to assemble them. The internet can tell us a lot but it can't make us doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, Generals, chefs, historians, scientists, and auto mechanics. Bringing the argument back to last week's post, spending time on pregnancy message boards and perusing MyNaturalHomeBirth.com (or something equally amateurish) does not give the reader the ability to pass a qualified medical judgment on anything. Sure, "experts" and professionals are wrong sometimes. However, something tells me that a doctor is right a little bit more frequently than some knucklehead typing "Is VBAC safe?" into a search engine.